Microsoft

Symantec Thursday said it was Microsoft’s code that crippled some PCs after upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) emptied Device Manager, deleted network connections, and packed the Registry with thousands of bogus entries.

Leftovers

A federal district judge in Washington State handed down an important decision this week on shrink-wrap license agreements and the First Sale Doctrine. The case concerned an eBay merchant named Timothy Vernor who has repeatedly locked horns with Autodesk over the sale of used copies of its software. Autodesk argued that it only licenses copies of its software, rather than selling them, and that therefore any resale of the software constitutes copyright infringement.

While nearly half of U.S. retailers have been hit with some kind of information security attack, only a small percentage of them have actually reported breaches to their customers, research company Gartner reports.

As the story circulates people start wondering what may be the background, and since the only sources are in Hungarian, here’s a summary of the circumstances:

A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS. (A ‘competitive’ bid with wording that all but ensures only Microsoft meets the requirements.) A Hungarian Watchdog Body (sort of like the FTC in the US) challenged the bidding process via the Court system, and a trial date was set for today. The trial was suddenly and unexpectedly rescheduled just as Ballmer arrived in Budapest. So there may be a perception of the Bully lobbying there.

If you can’t do the math, I think the bottom line is, it’s looking like Microsoft won’t let the world say no to OOXML. It couldn’t ram it through the usual process, with the folks who understand the tech, even with some very odd technical committee chairperson goings on. This is the standard that couldn’t win on merit, in short.

This has proven to be more time consuming than we had imagined. It may take a while to get the list compete. 3 letters done (A-C), many more to go. Microsoft left a big, big mess behind it. Readers can help by assembling links to more articles (preferably ‘off site’) and posting them here. Any help you can offer would be appreciated as it would substantiate more complaints. We have just under a week before the deadline. This golden opportunity we ought to take advantage of. █

This whole saga is not over yet. There are still things that we, the ‘little people’, can do to ensure justice is restored and then prevails. Having documented abuse of the process, we can seek truth and ensure that Microsoft is metaphorically getting caught with its pants down (or with an egg in the face).

While the decision has been stalled, the deadline for formal complaints remains pretty much the same. We emphasised before that it’s not over yet and further delayed can be expected, if not a full retraction.

According to ISO spokesman Roger Frost, “Because the period for receipt of appeals remains open until the end of May, ISO will communicate on the next steps in early June, when it knows whether any other national bodies are appealing.”

The South African Standards Body SABS have lodged an appeal at ISO against the awful fast-track process of DIS29500, or Microsoft Office OpenXML. Please call your national Standards Body and ask them to support this complain. You have only 7 days because the deadline is 30 May, 2 months after the ISO vote.

Steve Pepper, being so disgused about the intervention of a Norwegian bureaucrat reverting the decision of the Norwegian Technical Committee, is pointing at the fact that this person is also member of the ISO Technical Management Board (TMB), who will decide on the future of this appeal. I hope we will have some transparency on who is deciding what inside ISO on this appeal. It is time for ISO to clean up its stables, they have not been cleaned for several years, and they are getting dirty and smelly.

Like most assumptions about open source from Microsoft, a big piece of the overall picture is conveniently left out.

The context of Matusow’s blog entry is a trip he recently took to South Africa where he had talks about interoperability and open source issues. As noted in a Tectonic article, Matusow’s visit fell around the same time the South African government was approving the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for government use. (Funny…)

[...]

Matusow then goes on to make another, more specific, assumption about South Africa. Their local developers don’t seem to have the skill set to do any real contributions to OSS anyway, so the benefit of local participation is lost on them anyway.

Ignoring the fact that this is the single most arrogant thing I think I have heard anyone say about a nation’s potential (I’ll let my colleagues take that part of the argument on), who is Matusow to say anything about who can code what for Linux and OSS? Is you said “nobody,” you’re absolutely right.

This is the ‘Cathedral attitude’, to borrow ESR’s analogy. It shows that Microsoft continues to desire to develop everything that runs on your PC, no matter where you live. The company gives you opaque and overpriced binary files. This isn’t just unacceptable; it’s dangerous.

“There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.”

–Bill Gates

Once again, hat’s off to South Africa, whose recent victories and miseries (Microsoft gave them grief) are listed below. █

GNU/Linux

Free Geek Vancouver (FGV) is now certified as the first ethical recycler in western Canada by the Basel Action Network (BAN), and an important part of the certification is the organization’s refurbishing of used computers with free and open source software (FOSS).

After losing out on many software tenders to the government, the Linux Professional Association (LPA) will engage the Public Procurement Oversight Authority (PPOA) in Kenya over procurement rules, according to the association chairman.

The association members have been locked out of government tenders because the requests for proposals are usually skewed toward Microsoft products, therefore locking out open-source software developed locally, says LPA Chairman Evans Ikua.

We have just been using Zenwalk 5.2 beta for a few hours now, but it continues to live on as a distribution we would certainly recommend at least trying out. Zenwalk is quite polished and has a nice theme/artwork and is full-featured for being on an Xfce desktop and the ISO coming in at just over 500MB.

Microsoft is looking for Windows Home Server guinea pigs to test a public beta of a patch to a major corruption bug that has blighted the product since late last year.

The bug, which corrupts data on a number of well-known Microsoft and third-party apps when the programs are used to edit or transfer files in the firm’s latest server operating system for the low-end, home user market, first reared its ugly head in December.

I asked the organizers if our Free Software Group could hold a short session about the benefits of FOSS in education, with references to Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Kiwilinux and we were given a slot after the ones which had already been planned a while ago – those of Microsoft, Cisco and a local company that sells education software for Romanian schools.

[...]

It is sad to know they are resorting to this sort of coercing and that they have such influence over the educators but looking on the bright side of it, and that’s how I perceived it after thinking a bit about it, THEY ARE SCARED

I am very happy for Chevalier for a couple of reasons. First he has paid his dues and deserves a shot at running the Canadian operation. Secondly, he is a channel advocate and will try his best to create a win-win culture for Novell and its ever growing partner base.

Chevalier replaces Katie McAuliff, who is going off to run the
Americas channel. I do not want to be overly critical of McAuliff because she made a lot of time for CDN during her tenure as Novell
Canada president and I do appreciate that.

The fact that McAuliff spent time here and learned the way this market works will only help Novell
Canada partners since she is running that channel.

Computer Service Partners, a Raleigh-based IT Integrator was recently selected by CommunityONE Bank, N.A. to migrate 550 employees in 49 different locations from Novell to Microsoft E-mail and Domain Controller solutions, and concurrently consolidate operations at the bank’s corporate data center in Asheboro. CSP will also deploy Cisco IP phone systems initially in seven community offices, and over time implement Cisco Unified Communications solutions organization wide at CommunityONE.

Glyn’s observations, which seem to be based purely on this self-serving document, are as follows:

Politicans remain the ultimate dinosaurs in terms of openness: ideally, the rich and powerful would like to make their cosy deals – often aimed at that dangerous openness – behind closed doors.

[...]

This secret agreement, drawn up without any public discussion or oversight, would basically impose all of the worst aspects of US intellectual monopolies on everyone in sight – starting with willing stooges like the UK, and progressing to the unwilling but powerless.

Of great relevance to software patents and OOXML you may also find the following new article from Reuters. It’s about a former judge with professional tendencies that favour monopolisation. He just doesn’t realise this yet and lobbying might play a role here too. Deception through persistence and repetition can be alarmingly effective.

Earlier, he told the conference that although he signed the Microsoft judgment in September and was bound by secrecy, he understood “some of the worries” critics have expressed.

Vesterdorf said “one should be careful” not to encroach too much on patent rights “by a too-zealous enforcement of competition law”.

Come to consider the fact that Microsoft patented protocols which Neelie Kroes describes as too trivial to be patentable and too essential to have royalties imposed with their use, whose necessity is the result of brute market aggression.

Recall what Mark Webbink (of Red Hat at the time) said not so long ago:

“…there has been a proliferation of trivial and contestable patents triggered by a relaxation of the rules by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which has progressively lowered the bar for patent claims.”

Let the Bilski case [1, 2, 3, 4] serve as a reminder that questions now arise about the patentability of a curve ball! It becomes endlessly insane when the boundaries are improperly set to permit patentability of mathematics (algorithms at the least).

Don Knuth wrote a wonderful letter many years ago to warn about this. He is probably the world’s #1 authority on the subject of algorithms, but who is he to counter multi-billion-dollar software companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets?

“Don Knuth wrote a wonderful letter many years ago to warn about this.”Think about it for a second. If Microsoft spends about $10 million a year on lobbying (that which is discloses alone), this permits the company to employ more than 100 full-time people in suits — people whose career involves walking around Washington and taking people out to lunch, making phonecalls, back-room deals, etc.

Speaking of lousy Microsoft patents, will you have a look at this one from the news?

Microsoft has just snared a U.S. patent for proactive virus protection, which is how security software helps secure your PC when it encounters shape-shifting malware not already in its antivirus definition file. What I want to know is, what does this mean for all the other vendors — like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro — that have been selling proactive protection software for years? Do they now have to pay Microsoft protection; I mean, royalties?

Do not let Microsoft’s software patents scare you. They seem to be worthless after last week's big defeat (against Alcatel-Lucent). █

The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world

If Wikileaks were a print publication, the injunction that has shut down the site would be unthinkable. Back in 1931, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that allowed the closing of any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” periodical. This court, by contrast, has not only barred future publication of the documents at issue but elected to put Wikileaks out of business.

Judge Jeffrey White ordered domain registrar Dynadot to disable Wikileaks.org in response to Julius Baer & Co.’s complaint. The groups behind the request to lift the injunction claim that it violates the First Amendment.

Groupwise

Rather than creating direct integration with specific packages, Gwava puts all of its data into an SQL Server format that can be integrated by a supplier or enterprise as part of a custom solution. Unlike its other products, however, which interact directly with Novell GroupWise, Gwava’s Retain for BES does not require GroupWise. ”

M+Extranet 3.5 is an efficient and cost-effective solution for collaborating with non-GroupWise users, and instantly publishing GroupWise content on a company intranet site, client extranet site, or student portal. Content can be published as an HTML page, RSS feed, blog or podcast without the need for expensive web authoring tools or content duplication.

Mentioned last week was the following news, which Beta News gets to at the end. It seems like Beta News has found new affinity for Novell, especially because of Jacqueline Emigh. Bear in mind that Beta News is very Microsoft-oriented. It’s worth keeping track of which publications give positive/negative publicly to whom. It explains favouritism and prejudice.

Despite its well known interoperability deal with Microsoft, Novell still sees Redmond as the big competitor to catch in the groupware, collaboration, and messaging arenas, where the SuSE Linux distributor has just released the new, multiplatform Novell Open Workgroup Suite (NOWS) with Novell Teaming.

Virtualisation

Novell’s Stephen Pollack to Present at SYS-CON’s Virtualization Conference & Expo, June 23-24, in New York City

We wrote about virtualisation at Novell some hours ago. Novell is with Microsoft and its affiliates. Even SYS-CON, especially with the presence of Maureen O’Gara, is not friend of FOSS. She’s describing ODF as “Microsoft-hostile” at the moment, revealing her bias immediately. Her recent attacks on Stallman are not to be forgotten and they make SYS-CON seem like a tabloid, not just an annoying publication that floods Google New using spamming techniques.

Identity and Security Management

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Novell Inc. said Friday they will jointly offer migration services as part of an deal to migrate Hewlett-Packard identity center customers to Novell identity and security management products.

As part of an agreement between the companies, HP and Novell will jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology.

HP has exited the world of identity management and handed over its Identity Center customers to Novell as part of an exclusive alliance.

Remember what we wrote earlier on about the H-P relationship with Microsoft (and with Novell). Like Novell, H-P is another Microsoft pawn that promotes OOXML. It’s part of the cycle of nepotism and ‘protection’.

Genovate has also entered into a tie-up with infrastructure software and services company Novell to provide training in India. Genovate, with the partnership, would target both individuals and universities, he added.

Novell’s Past People

The largest limited partner in Canopy Ventures II is the family of legendary entrepreneur Ray Noorda, who founded Novell Inc. and was chief executive officer of the software company for 12 years until 1995.

The early-stage venture fund, which is backed by the Noorda family of Novell fame, is investing in life sciences for the first time, and also expanding its investment along the Wasatch Front.

“There are plenty of good opportunities in medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and there’s so much good technology and so many talented scientists affiliated with the University of Utah and BYU. Utah County was our backyard from the Novell days, but we’re now looking forward to branching out to northern Utah,” said Brandon Tidwell, another general partner with Canopy.

Since its establishment in 1995, Canopy has invested around $100 million in 13 technology companies in Utah, 10 of which are in Utah County. Canopy was founded by the late Ray Noorda, Novell’s founder and former CEO.

While I was working at Air New Zealand I assisted setting up a Novell network. I started thinking it was the way I wanted to go in terms of my career, so I bought my first computer and went from there. My first foray into IT was working in field sales in LA for a distributor of electronics called Hallmark Electronics. I started working with Kingston back then as they were one of the brands we had.

That’s all for this week, as far as good or innocent news are concerned. █